"This was Emma's idea, she can foot the bill."
Somehow I knew she had to be tied in with this, but maybe I can turn it to my advantage. "If Human Resources is involved, surely they're paying?" Which means, deep pockets to pick. "We're going to need two Herman Miller Aeron chairs, an Eames bookcase and occasional table, a desk from some eye-wateringly expensive Italian design studio, a genuine eighty-year-old Bonsai Californian redwood, an OC3 cable into Telehouse, and gaming laptops. Alienware: we need lots and lots of Alienware...."
Andy gives me five seconds to slaver over the fantasy before he pricks my balloon. "You'll take Dell and like it."
"Even if the bad guys frag us?" I try.
"They won't." He looks smug. "Because you're the best."
One of the advantages of being a cash-starved department is that nobody ever dares to throw anything away in case it turns out to be useful later. Another advantage is that there's ,never any money to get things done, like (for example) refit old offices to comply with current health and safety regulations.
It's cheaper just to move everybody out into a Portakabin in the car park and leave the office refurb for another financial year. At least, that's what they do in this day and age; thirty, forty years ago I don't know where they put the surplus bodies. Anyway, while Andy gets on the phone to Emma to plead for a budget, I lead Pete on a fishing expedition.
"This is the old segregation block," I explain, flicking on a light switch. "Don't come in here without a light or the grue will get you."
"You've got grues? Here?" He looks so excited at the prospect that I almost hesitate to tell him the truth.
"No, I just meant you'd just step in something nasty. This isn't an adventure game." The dust lies in gentle snowdrifts everywhere undisturbed by outsourced cleaning services — contractors generally take one look at the seg block and double their quote, going over the ministerially imposed cap (which gets imposed rigorously on Ops, freeing up funds so Human Resources can employ plant beauticians to lovingly wax the leaves on their office rubber plants). "You called it a segregation block. What, uh, who was segregated"
I briefly toy with the idea of winding him up, then reject it. Once you're inside the Laundry you're in it for life, and I don't really want to leave a trail of grudge-bearing juniors sharpening their knives behind me. "People we didn't want exposed to the outside world, even by accident," I say finally.
"If you work here long enough it does strange things to your head. Work here too long, and other people can see the effects, too. You'll notice the windows are all frosted or else they open onto air shafts, where there aren't any windows in the first place," I add, shoving open the door onto a large, executive office marred only by the bricked-up window frame in the wall behind the desk, and a disturbingly wide trail of something shiny — I tell myself it's probably just dry wallpaper paste — leading to the swivel chair. "Great, this is just what I've been looking for."
"It is"
"Yep; a big, empty, executive office where the lights and power still work."
"Whose was it?" Pete looks around curiously. "There aren't many sockets..."
"Before my time." I pull the chair out and look at the seat doubtfully. It was good leather once, but the seat is hideously stained and cracked. The penny drops. "I've heard of this guy.
'Slug' Johnson. He used to be high up in Accounts, but he made lots of enemies. In the end someone put salt on his back."
"You want us to work in here?" Pete asks, in a blinding moment of clarity.
"For now," I reassure him. "Until we can screw a budget for a real office out of Emma from HR."
"We'll need more power sockets." Pete's eyes are taking on a distant, glazed look and his fingers twitch mousily: "We'll need casemods, need overclocked CPUs, need fuck-off huge screens, double-headed Radeon X1600 video cards." He begins to shake. "Nerf guns, Twinkies, LAN party — "
"Pete! Snap out of it!" I grab his shoulders and shake him.
He blinks and looks at me blearily. "Whuh"
I physically drag him out of the room. "First, before we do anything else, I'm getting the cleaners in to give it a class four exorcism and to steam clean the carpets. You could catch something nasty in there." You nearly did, I add silently. "Lots of bad psychic backwash."
"I thought he was an accountant?" says Pete, shaking his head. "No, he was in Accounts. Not the same thing at all. You're confusing them with Financial Control."
"Huh? What do Accounts do, then"
"They settle accounts — usually fatally. At least, that's what they used to do back in the '60s; the department was terminated some time ago."
"Um." Pete swallows. "I thought that was all a joke? This is, like the BBFC? You know"
I blink. The British Board of Film Classification, the people who certify video games and cut the cocks out of movies? "Did anyone tell you what the Laundry actually does?"
"Plays lots of deathmatches?" he asks hopefully.
"That's one way of putting it," I begin, then pause. How to continue? "Magic is applied mathematics. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set. Demonology is right after debugging in the dictionary. You heard of Alan Turing? The father of programming"
"Didn't he work for John Carmack"
Oh, it's another world out there. "Not exactly, he built the first computers for the government, back in the Second World War. Not just codebreaking computers; he designed containment processors for Q Division, the Counter-Possession Unit of SOE that dealt with demon-ridden Abwehr agents.
Anyway, after the war, they disbanded SOE — broke up all the government computers, the Colossus machines — except for the CPU, which became the Laundry. The Laundry kept going, defending the realm from the scum of the multiverse.
There are mathematical transforms that can link entities in different universes — try to solve the wrong theorem and they'll eat your brain, or worse. Anyhow, these days more people do more things with computers than anyone ever dreamed of. Computer games are networked and scriptable, they've got compilers and debuggers built in, you can build cities and film goddamn movies inside them. And every so often someone stumbles across something they're not meant to be playing with and, well, you know the rest."
His eyes are wide in the shadows. "You mean, this is government work? Like in Deus Ex"
I nod. "That's it exactly, kid." Actually it's more like Doom 3 but I'm not ready to tell him that; he might start pestering me for a grenade launcher.
"So we're going to, like, set up a LAN party and log onto lots of persistent realms and search 'n' sweep them fot demons and blow the demons away?" He's almost panting with eagerness. "Wait'll I tell my homies!"
"Pete, you can't do that."
"What, isn't it allowed"
"No, I didn't say that." I lead him back towards the welllit corridors of the Ops wing and the coffee break room beyond. "I said you can't do that. You're under a geas. Section Ill of the Official Secrets Act says you can't tell anyone who hasn't signed the said act that Section III even exists, much less tell them anything about what it covers. The Laundry is one hundred percent under cover, Pete. You can't talk about it to outsiders, you'd choke on your own purple tongue."
"Eew." He looks disappointed. "You mean, like, this is real secret stuff. Like Mum's work."
"Yes, Pete. It's all really secret. Now let's go get a coffee and pester somebody in Facilities for a mains extension bar and a computer."
I spend the rest of the day wandering from desk to desk, filing requisitions and ordering up supplies, with Pete snuffling and shambling after me like a supersized spaniel. The cleaners won't be able to work over Johnson's office until next Tuesday due to an unfortunate planetary conjunction, but I know a temporary fix I can sketch on the floor and plug into a repurposed pocket calculator that should hold "Slug" Johnson at bay until we can get him exorcised. Meanwhile, thanks to a piece of freakish luck, I discover a stash of elderly laptops nobody is using; someone in Catering mistyped their code in their Assets database last year, and thanks to the wonders of our ongoing ISO 9000 certification process, there is no legal procedure for reclassifying them as capital assets without triggering a visit by the Auditors. So I duly issue Pete with a 1.4 gigahertz Toshiba Sandwich Toaster, enlist his help in moving my stuff into the new office, nail a WiFi access point to the door like a tribal fetish or mezuzah ("this office now occupied by geeks who worship the great god GHz"), and park him on the other side of the spacious desk so I can keep an eye on him.